Sociotelematics: leveraging interaction-relationships in developing telematics systems to support cooperative convoys

In a cooperative convoy, a vehicle interacts with other vehicles, service providers and infrastructure systems to make the travel safe and convenient. Through these interactions a vehicle can share its domain-specific information - acquired from service providers and infrastructure - with other vehicles in the convoy. Such interactions are subject to defined agreements and constraints between the entities (i.e., vehicle to vehicle, vehicle to service providers, and so on), which may need to adapt with the changes of requirements. Also a driver may want to automate certain interactions to reduce distraction during driving. A cooperative convoy telematics system should support collaboration (i.e., allow drivers to share specific travel information) and coordination, and be able to cope with the changes. In this paper, we address these issues and demonstrate how our interaction-relationship modeling technique can be exploited to develop a telematics system provides such flexibility. This system allows interactions and coordination preferences explicitly specified and updated to cope with the changes. In particular, our service oriented implementation enhances flexibility and adaptability of the system making it easily deployable and changeable. We have implemented a prototype based on a client-server architecture where the client application is developed for Android and the server is running on the Amazon cloud. The system's performance and resource consumption were evaluated using real-life experiments